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Building the new version of the app Blocos de Rua I was challenged to customize the UITabBar so it meets what the designer wants. In iOS 5 this is pretty easy to do but I haven’t figured out the proper way to do it from the beginning, this post is my findings on how to do it properly by correctly using the new iOS 5 APIs to customize appearance.

A few months ago I was looking for a technology to run the server side of a
iPhone app. And I had two in mind: Ruby on Rails and
Django (Python).

Why not others options? I already knew Java and its web frameworks but I didn’t
want to use any of them because Java needs a lot of RAM even for the most simple
things and I don’t want a big server before I really need it. PHP I don’t like
the syntax, it is ugly.

This post is not a technical comparison between the languages, it’s why I’ve
chosen to learn one of them first.

Back them in 2005 I was starting my developer career and as almost all other
developers I didn’t care about anything that wasn’t the quality of my code, how
many features it has and if it “works as expected”.

Actually it’s pretty simple to do. But if you try just by reading the documentation you’ll find
the same problem I did.

Suppose that I need to get a list of all ages I had on my database to make a hierarchical
navigation that starts by selecting an age. If were working directly with the SQLite store I could
execute this SQL to do this:

Disclaimer: I don’t care about anything outside Metro on Windows 8
and this post is strictly about Metro apps.

The best thing about Metro is that it is being designed to be consistent. They’ve created
a set guidelines to show how a Metro app should behave and look like. (The other best thing
is that it doesn’t run Flash)

It’s surprisingly good see how Microsoft is teaching Windows developers that in
order to build a great app they need to be consistent with the platform and Metro
is being built from the ground up to be consistent.

Having a “baked” blog, meaning every page is static baked by a system (Octopress)
on my machine before it goes to the server, makes it more secure. I realize that
I forget to talk about this on my last post
when I was reading a post
about security from Dreamhost.

My previous configuration was Wordpress with more or less 10 plug-ins. Very
often I forget to update them all, so my blog for various periods of time was
vulnerable to known attacks until I remember to update everything. Of course
this isn’t Wordpress fault, it’s mine. I forget to update.

It would be nice to declare a winner here, but right now, there is no
clear winner. Some apps are best suited for native and some are best
suited for the web.

I don’t think Mahemoff read his own article before writing the
conclusion. Native won most of the categories: Feature Richness,
Performance, Developer Experience, Look-And-Feel, Discoverability and
Monetization. Of course HTML5 is catching up but it’s not an even yet,
native is still better to build great apps.

One last think, in my opinion PhoneGap is a huge workaround and should
never be used.